Search

The Ultimate Distro

by Glyn Moody

on December 27, 2006

The name of Gaël
Duval's new distro,
Ulteo, with its
hint of the word "ultimate", smacks of a certain ambition. But Duval
probably means it in the sense that it is the last distribution you will ever
need to install, because thereafter it will "self-upgrade automatically," as
the
announcement
of the alpha release put it. Ease-of-use has been a constant theme in
Duval's work. When he
launched
his first distro, Mandrake, in July 1998, one of his stated goals was "to provide a working and easy-to-install linux-distribution to people who
don't want to spend too much time in installing and configuring their Linux
system : just install it and USE IT.">

But if the vision has been steadfast, the path to achieving it has proved
somewhat stony. First Mandrake
acquired
Conectiva to form Mandriva, and then, in March 2006, Duval was "laid off", as
the euphemism has it. If you're interested, you can read Duval's
comments
on the whole affair, as well as
those
of François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva, and decide for yourself
what really happened. But looking at the bigger picture, what's
interesting about the Mandrake/Ulteo saga is that it recapitulates so much of
the recent history of free software, as new distros have continually been
created in an attempt to resolve the perceived shortcomings of existing
offerings.

In the beginning, Linus created two floppy discs, called "boot"
and "root". As Lars Wirzenius, Linus' Helsinki friend and someone who
had the privilege of being present at the birth of Linux, explained to me a
few years ago:

The boot disk had the kernel. When that booted, it asked
you to insert the other disk, and that had the whole file system for the Linux
system. All the stuff that these days would be put on a hard disc was on
that floppy. But it was a very, very small file system, very few
programs, just enough to be called an independent Unix system.

Copies of these discs were placed on a server at Helsinki University.
They were soon mirrored around the world, for example at the Manchester
Computing Centre (MCC), part of the University of Manchester, in the UK.
It was probably here that, in the nicest possibly way, the distro wars
started. The MCC decided it could do something a little better than
Linus' basic two discs, and put together the MCC Interim distribution, which
first appeared in February 1992, barely six months after Linus had
revealed
Linux to the world. Shortly afterwards, other distros
appeared: Dave Safford's TAMU (Texas A&M University) and Martin Junius' MJ
collections, followed by Peter MacDonald's famous SLS release.

It was SLS that prompted a rather remarkable diatribe in the very
first issue of Linux Journal, dated March
1994, that pinpoints the fundamental challenge facing any distro-maker:

Many distributions have started out as fairly good systems, but
as time passes, attention to maintaining the distribution becomes a secondary
concern. A case-in-point is the Soft landing Linux System (better known
as SLS). It is quite possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained
Linux distribution available; unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the
most popular.

The author of these strong words was a young
Ian
Murdock, explaining what prompted him to create his own
distribution, which he named "Debian" after his wife and himself -
Deb+Ian. As he told me in 2000: "I regret how harsh I was, because the
guy was just trying to do something good." They may have been typical
young man's words, but they are also symptomatic of a feeling that seems to
have welled up time and again within the free software community: that the
current distros just don't do their job well enough - and that something
better is possible.

There's a nice graphical
representation
of this constant sprouting and growth, and it's interesting to
note that Murdock's Debian has proved a strong stock for new shoots of the
distro tree. But this shows only a tiny part of the total richness: the
indispensable
Distrowatch
lists over 300 distributions in its main
listing
.

This is one of free software's greatest and least-appreciated
strengths: the fact that it can continue to evolve in an almost organic
fashion, untrammelled by constraints of economics, or even
feasibility. It is this fecundity that drives free software forward
unstoppably, and that distinguishes it from the sterile code monster that is
Windows, which, trapped within the carapace of its closed source, only
slouches towards Redmond to be born every five years or so. And it is
precisely because of this ever-present, irrepressible urge to trump what has
gone before, and to create the ultimate distro, that there will never be
one.